Nothing has changed the hope this day brought

Fifteen years ago today, we awoke after the impossible, the improbable and, for many, the unimaginable had happened.

On Nov. 5, 2008, the world awoke, for the first time, to a Black president-elect of the United States.

There are political moments that transcend politics and become historic events immediately recognized as cultural touchstones. That is what happened at 10 p.m. CST on Nov. 4, 2008, when it was announced that Barack Obama — OK, Barack Hussein Obama — would be this country’s 44th commander in chief.

The most unique of all U.S. presidents, Obama is the only one whose full name is used as a slur by those who consider him an enemy and seek to cast aspersions on him.

Born in Hawaii to a Black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, and, who as a child, lived for three years in Indonesia, Obama traveled further from our geographic and imaginative periphery than anyone, before or after, to occupy the Oval Office, which he ascended to with amazing speed.

Think about this: Obama, an Illinois state senator, became a household name in July 2004 when, as a candidate for the

U.S. Senate, he delivered an electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. He went on to serve two terms as president. He has been out of office for seven years, and we’ve yet to reach the 20th anniversary of that speech.

But we have reached the 15th anniversary of his election. On Nov. 4, 2008, what brought home the magnitude of what had just happened was the Obama family strolling across the stage, each parent holding a daughter’s hand.

That is when it hit that this Black family would be living in the White House.

John Lewis, civil rights leader and congressman, knew that Obama’s election was made possible because of the 1965 Selma campaign in Alabama for voting rights.

Thinking of the beatings inflicted on him and hundreds of others on “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965 for trying to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Lewis said, “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”

But the coming of Obama did not mean the end of racism, and talk about his election ushering in a “post-racial era” was always foolish. His election signaled progress, but it also energized those opposed to this progress.

Obama was the only man to assume the nation’s highestelected berth while having to refute lies about his place of birth. So toxic and unrelenting was the racist birther movement that the nation’s first Black president became the first president compelled to show his papers — his birth certificate.

Most criticism and opposition to Obama’s presidency was rooted in genuine policy and ideological disagreements about the role of government. They came from waters of honorable dissent, not dark and toxic racial undercurrents like birtherism. Obama’s presidency was consequential, with the most enduring of his legacies being the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

But it was not his administration’s accomplishments or a glance at the calendar that made me think about Obama. It is that his successor and the most notable proponent of birtherism, Donald Trump, keeps making speeches in which he thinks he is running against Obama instead of President Joe Biden.

In a speech in Washington, D.C., last month, Trump said that he was leading in the polls “by a lot, including Obama.” Later, referring to the 2016 election, he said, “With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won.”

More recently, in New Hampshire, he said, “And it has never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden, and frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama. It is his boss.”

I find it ironic that 50 years after Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to Black people, he is now allowing our first Black president to live rent-free in his head.

For all our frightening and maddening problems, what happened 15 years ago — and four years after that — still astonishes and gives me hope.

We elected a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama as our president.

Associated Press file photo On Nov. 4, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama, wife Michelle and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, emerged as the nation’s next first family. Fifteen years later, this historic moment still resonates.